During his high school days in Pyongyang in the mid-1920s, Kim Namch'ŏn (1911–53?) founded with his classmates a literary circle called “The Castle on the Moon” (wŏllyŏk). The reading list of this group was filled with the works of renowned Japanese writers, among whom Kim particularly admired Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892–1927). A decade later, Kim would recall, “While I was deeply absorbed in Akutagawa, he committed suicide. I had never in such earnest worshipped a writer before or since” (1938a, 383).Footnote ¹ Yet, despite his admiration for modernist experimentalists such as Akutagawa and Yokomitsu Riichi, Kim eventually chose a different path for his own literary career. In 1929, while attending Hōsei University in Tokyo, he joined the local division of the socialist cultural organization KAPF (Korea Artista Proleta Federatio, 1925–35). In his own words, he then chose to become “a foot soldier in politics rather than a master in arts” (Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1938c, 58). Kim went on to become one of the most accomplished leftist writers in Korea, distinguishing himself with his critical acumen and a rare aesthetic inventiveness. He reached the peak of his literary success in the years between 1938 and 1941. When the prestigious journal Inmun P'yŏngnon (Humane Criticism) held a literary criticism contest in 1941, it invited its readers to write on three prominent contemporary novelists: Yu Chino, Yi Hyosŏk, and Kim Namch'ŏn.Footnote ²

Kim is believed to have been executed in North Korea around 1953, when factionalism within the regime led to the purge of many intellectuals within that country (Kim Namch'ŏn Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu2000, 1:599). His name has since been erased from the literary history of the North. Meanwhile, in the South, Kim's works were banned on account of the writer's defection to the North in Reference Kim Namch'ŏn1947. When the ban was lifted in Reference Kim Namch'ŏn1988, these works became the object of intense critical interest within academic circles. Reading him then was a generation of scholars committed to leftist activism.Footnote ³ Amid the social struggles for the democratization of South Korea, these scholars rescued Kim Namch'ŏn's literature to the prominence it had enjoyed during the colonial period. After having been forgotten for nearly four decades, today Kim Namch'ŏn is acknowledged as one of the central figures in the history of modern Korean literature.

Kim and his KAPF comrades lived through a time of deep transformations in the history of colonial Korea and the Japanese empire. At the organization's birth in the mid-1920s, Korea was still a predominantly agricultural country that provided great quantities of rice to the Japanese mainland. By the time the KAPF was forcibly dissolved in 1935, however, the colony had undergone a rapid process of industrialization, and it had become an integral part of the imperial developmental project. Its rising economic importance coincided with Japan's move to eradicate oppositional forces as well as to expedite the cultural assimilation of the peninsula—a policy that culminated around 1940 with the imposition of Japanese language, religion, and names for all Koreans. Amid expanding wealth and shrinking freedom in the colony, Kim and the other leftists found it increasingly difficult to circumvent the oppressive forces of censorship and imprisonment. These intellectuals became subject to enormous pressure to recant their socialist convictions, and by the time the so-called Greater East Asian War started in 1941, most of them were either silent or had become compliant, to varying extents, with the ideological directives of the imperial government.

Writing during this tumultuous period, Kim Namch'ŏn left a complex body of work that defies any easy, overarching interpretation. Upon his rediscovery in 1988, critics such as Chang Sasŏn, Yi Sanggap, and Yi Tŏkhwa immediately identified Kim as a major proponent of literary realism during the late colonial period. In their eyes, Kim was a socialist writer who joined a nationalist cause with a materialist critique of colonial society (Chang Reference Chang1988; Yi Tŏkhwa Reference Yi Tŏkhwa1991; Yi Sanggap Reference Yi Sanggap1994, Reference Yi Sanggap1995). In more recent years, however, other critics have come to contest such a straightforward reading of Kim. To do so, they have pointed to a discrepancy between the writer's theoretical reflections and his actual literary practice. In his theoretical work, Kim consistently advocated realism as his own guiding aesthetic principle. An admirer of Honoré de Balzac and the intellectual kin of Georg Lukács, Kim actively theorized literature as a conduit for the organic critique of society, history and, more generally, “reality.” Within his fictional writings, however, Kim also displayed a seemingly antithetical interest in the fragmentary and the contingent, which he conveyed by using experimentalist techniques such as montage, multiple points of view, and stream of consciousness. Here, in the separate locus of his writerly practice, Kim would often delight in detail as he depicted a signboard, a café, a busy street, and, in general, the fleeting scenes of urban modernity. In effect, the consensus today seems to be that Kim did not give practical application to his aesthetic ideal of realism. In the readings of critics such as Ch'ae Hosŏk and Kim Chul, the writer has rather become emblematic of a colonial intellectual who was deeply split in his aesthetic as well as ideological allegiances (Ch'ae Reference Ch'ae1999; Kim Chul Reference Kim Chul2001). Ch'ae has suggested that Kim may at one point have renounced his socialist commitment. And Kim Chul has gone even further, seeing in the writer not only an acquiescent acceptance of the status quo, but also a willing inclination toward the government-sponsored ideology of pan-Asianism.

In resisting the foregoing consensus, this paper takes seriously Kim Namch'ŏn's claim to have “never written a work that did not accord with my critical argument” (Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1939c, 511). If Kim did indeed remain faithful to his aesthetic ideal of realism, then the challenge facing us now is to interpret him carefully: We must look at what Kim meant by realism, how he theorized its aesthetic, and how he practiced that aesthetic within the changing conditions of colonial Korea. In particular, my analysis will focus on Kim's early theorization of everyday life—the sphere of ordinary and experiential daily occurrences—as a literary space fully apt for a materialist critique of society and history. It is through this move, I will suggest, that Kim reformulated his aesthetic into a novel but still recognizable form of realism. As my analysis will show, Kim remained faithful to this aesthetic principle throughout his career, but he applied it in his fictions with varying degrees of consistency. In the end, I believe, in his creative practice, Kim could not always maintain a critical distance from the everyday spectacles of urban modernity. Yet his focus on the everyday also allowed him to resist both the excesses of dogmatic socialism and the utopian visions of the pan-Asianist ideology.

The four main sections of this paper follow a roughly chronological order. We will first attend to how the Korean leftists were affected by Japan's policy of forced conversion (tenkō) during the early 1930s. The arrest and subsequent trial of many intellectuals forms an important historical background to Kim's own reformulation of a realist aesthetic in the late 1930s. We will then focus on this crucial stage of Kim's literary development, observing how, reacting to the pressures of the political environment, Kim theorized everyday life as the proper space for a Marxist critique of society and history. We will then go on, in the following two sections, to look at how Kim put his theoretical ideal into practice in two of his most representative works, Noksŏngdang (The Green Star Pharmacy, 1938) and Maek (Barley, 1941). And finally, in a brief conclusion, I will address the broader significance of this analysis for our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of colonial Korea. As I will suggest there, Kim's literary experience is indicative of the resilience of leftist culture within the increasingly oppressive political conditions of late colonial Korea. Even after their inevitable political defeat, I believe, the most resourceful leftist intellectuals were still able to preserve their distinctive countercultural voices amid the cacophonous din of censorship, imprisonment, propaganda, and a fast-approaching world war.

The Historical Background: Japan's Thought Control and Its Effects on Leftist Writers

I begin my discussion by considering the impact of chŏnhyang, forced ideological conversion, on Korean leftist writers. This political event marked a watershed in the development of literary leftism in Korea, and it led Kim Namch'ŏn to fundamentally reconsider his previous political and aesthetic assumptions. As we will see in this and the next sections, through this process, Kim came to question his dogmatic socialist views in favor of a more critical approach, one in which the application of Marxist tenets would be adapted to the contingent historical situation of colonial Korea.

Japan had its thought control policy, known as the Peace Preservation Law, in place by 1925, but it was not until 1927, when the conservatives gained the upper hand in the government, that the police began to actively enforce the law in order to dissolve oppositional forces (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1976, 69–96). The primary target of this law were the members and sympathizers of the Japanese Communist Party. In a particularly infamous incident in 1933, Kobayashi Takiji, a socialist writer and a party member, died under torture during police interrogation. In the majority of cases, however, the Japanese government deployed a less violent strategy of co-optation of the intellectuals, and toward that goal, it adopted the policy of forced conversion in 1931 (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1976, 127). Under this policy, the police were allowed to use both coercive and persuasive means to pressure those arrested into recanting their ideologies and pledging future support for the government's cause. Japan implemented this policy widely, not only in the imperial mainland but also in its colonies of Taiwan and Korea.

In Korea, the frequent subjects of Japan's thought control were the socialist writers of the KAPF. The police first arrested the leading members of the organization in 1931 under the charge of conspiring for the reconstruction of the Korean Communist Party (Kwŏn Reference Kwŏn1998, 419–420). All were released except Kim Namch'ŏn, who was indicted for his role as an agitator in a labor strike. Kim was sentenced to two years of imprisonment and released on sick bail in 1933. He was spared from a second wave of arrests in 1934, when the police again rounded up most of the known KAPF members, with the aim of disbanding the organization. This time, twenty-four writers were seized for mounting a theatrical production of Erich Remarque's 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front, whose antiwar message may have implied a protest against Japan's annexation of Manchuria in Reference Kim Namch'ŏn1931. At the trial in 1935, none received a sentence heavier than three years of imprisonment, and all were released on probation. According to the trial records, the court distributed relatively light sentences because the writers had “pledged to convert” (Kwŏn Reference Kwŏn1998, 324). Most likely, Kim Namch'ŏn also made such a pledge at some time between 1933 and 1934.

It is difficult to gauge the exact extent and content of the Korean writers' “conversions.” Within the imperial mainland, Japan's policy proved quite effective in eradicating internal oppositions. Many Japanese leftists converted from socialism to nationalism after the 1933 release of a joint statement by Sano Manbu and Nabeyama Sadachika, in which the two leaders of the Japanese Communist Party denounced the “foreign” ideology of socialism and avowed their support for the Japanese imperial enterprise (Sano and Nabeyama Reference Sano and Nabeyama1933; see also Mitchell Reference Mitchell1976, 109–11).Footnote ⁴ In Korea, however, the same policy had a less clear impact. It was only around 1937, at the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, that Korean leftists began to express outspoken support for Japan's military ambitions (Chŏn Reference Chŏn2004; Kim Chaeyong Reference Kim Chaeyong2004). Prior to that time, the writers had generally responded to the pressure of the Japanese authorities in less committed ways, typically by promising to withdraw from politics. In the first case of a publicized conversion in 1934, former KAPF chairman Pak Yŏnghŭi denounced the past politicized literature of proletarian writers. Pak called for the writers' return to literature, in particular to “realism,” by which he meant a faithful depiction of reality without an ideological bias (Pak Yŏnghŭi Reference Pak1934). He coined the apt phrase, “Gained was an ideology and lost was arts,” which became instantly famous and was widely discussed among Korean writers. Indeed, Pak's turn from politicized literature to literature without politics seems to have set the basic pattern for other writers' conversions. In recalling the KAPF writers' collective recantation at the 1935 trial, for instance, Paek Ch'ŏl wrote, “At the court, most of us stated our determination to return to the truth of literature. This was the moment when the KAPF decided to abandon its politics-first policy and return to literature. It was also the most natural thing to do, given our status as defenders” (Reference Paek, Kyuch'an and Kihyŏng1935, 473–74).

Yet if the writers generally stated their intention to “return to literature,” it was less clear what their new aesthetic and ideological orientations would be. In fact, many of them were at a loss. They returned to the writer's desk from the battlefield of politics only to find literature as they had known it no longer possible to practice. What new direction to take became the focus of intense debates in the following years. The highly respected Yi Kiyŏng, for example, fell back to writing in the style of earlier proletarian stories, plainly describing the life of the poor, but such stories no longer had the subversive power that they had commanded in the mid-1920s. Meanwhile, Pak Yŏnghŭi's proposal of a revised form of nonideological, “objective” realism was met with strong opposition from the more idealistic members of the KAPF. Against Pak, Im Hwa especially upheld an ideal of “realism with a romantic spirit,” a literature infused with an optimistic socialist vision of history: “No true realism is possible without a sincere romantic spirit—a spirit that guides humanity to a broad future from a historical perspective” (Reference Im Hwa1989, 23–24). Read in the contemporary context, Im was in effect proposing a version of socialist realism. But his proposal, too, was not a viable option in the political situation of the late 1930s. For one thing, stories with an explicit socialist outlook could not survive intensified censorship.Footnote ⁵ And besides, a Soviet-style, heroic representation of class struggle crowned by the triumph of the proletariat would have commanded little credibility after the general demise of the leftist movements within Korea.

Kim entered the theoretical debate at this juncture, responding to Im Hwa in an essay entitled “On Changing the Method for Creation” (1934). In his essay, Kim argued that only a more radical and autonomous rethinking of their assumptions would lead the KAPF writers to properly regenerate their literary practice. As he wrote in a veiled criticism of Im, “we [the KAPF writers] should no longer repeat our old, unscrupulous practice of directly adopting solutions from foreign comrades instead of devising one on our own” (Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1934a, 63). More precisely, Kim's target was the dogmatic deference of the KAPF writers to the aesthetic guidelines adopted by their Soviet counterparts. In a series of essays written thereafter, Kim urged his fellow writers to critically reinterpret the meaning of “socialist” in socialist realism in order to create a literature that would be relevant to their own political situation:

In obvious reference to the Soviet Union and colonial Korea, Kim stressed the different historical contingencies between the two countries. The local particularities of Korea, Kim argued, could hardly fit within a grand historical narrative of universal revolutionary progress. Accordingly, the most urgent task for Korean leftists would be that of developing their own literary model first, and then deploying that model in the representation of the lived reality of colonial Korea in all its specificities.

Kim thus criticized his fellow writers' uncritical adherence to a foreign-originated socialism. It is important to note, however, that he did not renounce the socialist ideal per se. All along, he recognized the necessity of analyzing the local problems of colonial Korea from an essentially Marxist internationalist perspective. Herein lay the novelty of Kim's position within the KAPF debates, and, at the same time, its difficulty. In an increasingly oppressive political environment, the revolutionary optimism of traditional proletarian stories sounded jarringly empty. Yet the need remained for a literature that would expose social inequalities in an age of imperialism. Providing a viable direction for this literature became a major concern for Kim Namch'ŏn, and to that task he would devote his energies in the following years.Footnote ⁶

Theorizing a Marxist Aesthetic of Everyday Life

Against the background of the debates within the KAPF, Kim Namch'ŏn set out to develop a new aesthetic program for a socialist literature suited to Korea and its situation. This was a challenging task, and initially Kim focused more on exposing the old vices. In 1937, for example, he introduced his vision for what he called a “literature of indictment” (kobal munhak):

Emerging from this invective is a program distinctive in its all-consuming passion for criticism—a program perhaps more akin to the negative aesthetic of an avant-garde than to any normative socialist literature. Indeed, given the predominantly polemical thrust of the foregoing vision, it may seem that the writer, then barely twenty-six years old, did not at this point have a positive proposal on which to base his literary practice.

Yet Kim also insisted that his program was “a development of our proper realist spirit, only a localized manifestation of it.” In emphasizing the continuity between his vision and past literary practices, Kim meant to offer a constructive critique of those practices. Since the late 1920s, the KAPF writers had typically centered their stories around the theme of class struggle, often telling black-and-white tales of conflict between laborers (or peasants) and agricultural or industrial capitalists. Kim himself had previously practiced such an approach to literature, producing rousing depictions of the industrial proletariat as the agent that would eventually bring about the fulfillment of Marx's historical prophecy.Footnote ⁷ With his literature of indictment, Kim in effect proposed to abandon schematism and teleology in favor of a more eclectic, less doctrinal approach to literary production. While still working within the framework of a Marxist aesthetic, Kim aimed to expand the reach of socialist literature from the confined realm of class struggle to the broader space of what he called “a variety of different lifestyles.”

We can read Kim's proposal as at once involving a denial of Marx's teleological determinism and an affirmation of the German thinker's historical materialism. Instinctively distrustful of any narrative of necessary development, Kim at the same time thought that the reality of all social and historical phenomena was to be found in their material basis:

Departing further from the more traditional forms of Marxism, however, Kim did not regard this material basis to be restricted to the sphere of economic phenomena. While acknowledging economic relations as among the prime determinants of social phenomena, Kim also insisted that a realist writer should look beyond them to depict life in its multiple dimensions. In so relaxing the strict economic focus of previous KAPF literature, Kim was looking for an antidote to the schematism that had plagued the movement in the past. In effect, by liberalizing his commitment to “modern materialism,” Kim laid the basis for a literary practice that would “return to literature” while still performing its function of providing a materialist critique of society.

Once he took his materialism beyond the confines of the economical, Kim came to the conclusion that life itself, in all its economic, social, cultural, and political aspects, constituted the proper object of interest for a realist writer. At the core of his proposal, Kim placed the understanding that a writer is first and foremost an observer of the everyday, a chronicler of events that happen banally and ordinarily. The task of the realist, Kim suggested, would be to select and illuminate those events, placing them in a light that is revealing of their deeper and more essential structures (Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1938g, 420–21). A broadly materialist critique would thereby be induced through a writerly practice, but that practice ought to remain grounded in the observation of everyday life. A critique was for Kim inherent in the representation of daily occurrences, but it should not schematically structure that representation. Kim's vision thus adapted a social critique to the everyday at the same time that it theorized the everyday as a proper space for that critique. In effect, we could say, Kim quotidianized Marxist theory and politicized the everyday, bringing the two together within a literary practice aimed at social criticism.

Kim further articulated his vision for a Marxist aesthetic of everyday life by relying on the theories of Tosaka Jun (1900–1945), a Japanese leftist philosopher who was among the few never to recant his socialism.Footnote ⁸ Before Kim, Tosaka had moved to free a Marxist approach from the constraints of a narrow focus on economic phenomena. He had come to reflect on the autonomous significance of culture as a shaping force of society through his analysis of the contemporary ultranationalist assertion of pure Japanese cultural identity dubbed “Japanism.” In writings such as Shishō to shite no bungaku (Literature as Thought, Reference Tosaka Jun1936a) and Shishō to fūzoku (Thought and Custom, Reference Tosaka Jun1936b), Tosaka had argued that one should study an ideology not only in its institutional aspects but also in its quotidian form, that of common morals (tōdoku). As the ethical codes of a society, he thought, morals have a double relevance to its economic basis: While derivative of the production relations of society, morals are by no means mere reflections of those relations, as they can exert a considerable influence on social changes by determining an individual's consciousness and behaviors. In accord with his conceptualization of morals as the quotidian form of ideology, Tosaka sought to create a new social science whose primary object of analysis would be the culture of everyday life, which he called “customs” (fūzoku).Footnote ⁹ In comparing such a science to literature, he argued that science, like literature, should take more interest in the mundane aspects of life, while literature should represent life though its scientific understanding.

In a series of essays written in 1938, Kim Namch'ŏn borrowed Tosaka's notions of “customs” and “morals” to theorize his own aesthetic ideal (Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1938b, Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1938d, Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1938e). For Kim, as for Tosaka, the customs of a society encompassed “not just the economic, political or cultural aspects of life, but the entire social phenomena that include all the layers of the material structure of society” (Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1938d, 359). According to Kim, the thematic expansion of Korean leftist literature would depart from a proper acknowledgment of the significance of customs, so understood, within Korean society. At the same time, Kim added another semantic layer to Tosaka's concept by distinguishing p'ungsok (fūzoku read in Korean) from set'ae, another Korean word that could translate into “trends.” In Kim's usage, set'ae meant culture as it was sensually experienced by individuals, while p'ungsok came to connote culture as it was rationally understood in its structural relations. By contrasting the two, Kim was seeking to define his aesthetic ideal against that of contemporary modernist writers. He suggested that a realist writer should go beyond the modernist depiction of set'ae to represent p'ungsok. By looking at everyday reality through the lens of morals, Kim argued, a writer would be able to capture its structural and material elements without stopping at its more contingent and transitory aspects (1938g, 420–21).

In attending to the pervasive presence of ideology in everyday life, Kim shared a kindred spirit not only with Tosaka Jun but also with contemporary Western Marxists such as Georg Lukács (1885–1971) and Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937).Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, Kim would later develop a keen fondness for Lukács's theory of historical realism (Lukács 1962), and Kim's distinction between the sensual and the rational modes of representing reality resonates with the Hungarian critic's opposition of modernism to realism as a sensual aesthetic of fragmentation versus a rational aesthetic of totality (Lukács Reference Lukács, Mander and Mander1963).Footnote ¹¹ The affinities between the two critics, however, should not blind us to one important difference. As an oppositional European intellectual, Lukács never really questioned the validity of Marx's teleological vision of history. Rather, he was most apprehensive that capitalist alienation—man's estrangement from his environment, labor, and self—might hamper the inevitable progression of history toward its revolutionary fulfillment (Lukács Reference Lukács and Rodney1971, 83–222). Because he believed that modernist art prevented people from overcoming their alienation, Lukács adamantly opposed it, instead championing the more structural, “totalistic” vision of realism. By contrast, Kim Namch'ŏn seriously doubted that a Marxist historical vision could be applied to colonial Korea. Because his motivating concern was the rejuvenation of literary leftism in Korea, Kim stressed that a Korean writer should actively induce a sense of the direction of history through the close observation of the everyday, instead of more passively describing it as a determined outcome of dialectical necessity. Accordingly, while Kim agreed with Lukács in principle on the necessity of representing the totality of everyday reality, in practice, he was more inclined to give priority to “everyday” over “totality” in the actual execution of his literary projects.

Everyday life (ilsang saenghwal) became a topic of interest in Korean public discourse only in the 1930s. Its emergence coincided with the growth of the urban middle class—industrialists and professionals who were mostly uninterested in large social issues—and with an intensifying police repression that inevitably weakened the appeal of the grand narratives of liberation or revolution. In the depoliticized commercial culture that ensued, the urban elites started to enjoy a new lifestyle that was dependent on modern commodities, and the mass media turned that lifestyle into a public ideal by celebrating it on newspapers, magazines, and films. The discursive emergence of everyday life, then, marked the moment when modernity became a mass phenomenon and a popular ideal. It was then that the spectacles of modernity ceased to be regarded as curiosities, and instead became normative displays of what Korea should become. In the thriving urban culture of 1930s Korea, the everyday became synonymous with prosperity and with the modernizing values of Japan and the West.

In the cultural history of the twentieth century, it has been common for the process of modernization to trigger an artistic reaction, which in the West found its expression especially in the individualist aesthetic of modernism. In Korea, too, modernist writers such as Pak T'aewŏn and Yi Sang resisted the more commercialized forms of everyday life, reconfiguring the everyday as a space of private, authentic experiences that was consciously removed from the commotions of modernity (Poole Reference Poole2004). In comparison, we have seen that Kim Namch'ŏn's reaction took a rather more aggressive form. Within Kim's literary aesthetic, the everyday was appropriated as a concrete historical space that was fully apt for a materialist critique of colonial modernity. Accordingly, if Kim shared with the modernists an interest in everyday life as a literary space, he did not necessarily share their approach to that space. As a leftist intellectual in an increasingly oppressive environment, Kim was intensely exposed to the experience of alienation and political disenfranchisement. He reacted to these pressures not only by withdrawing from the world, but also by more engagedly trying to critique and demystify it.

We will move on, in the next two sections, to analyze Kim's literary practice in light of these reflections. As we will observe, Kim was not always consistent in pursuing his newly developed literary program. Yet it will be apparent that he intended to hold on to that program as a guiding principle of his literary practice. Regardless of whether Kim succeeded in his intent, he pursued his writing under the ideal of literature as a social critique induced from the close observation of everyday life.

Searching for History in Everyday Life

We have seen so far how Kim Namch'ŏn came to reconceive his ideal of realism as that of an aesthetic of everyday life filtered through a Marxist materialist prism. In the aftermath of his forced recantation in the mid-1930s, Kim proposed that the proper creative method for a writer was to induce insights into the material relations of society through the careful exploration of its everyday details. With these theoretical reflections mostly completed by 1938, Kim went on in subsequent years to compose some of the most experimental fictions ever produced by a Korean writer. In works such as Chŏ rǔl ttaerigo (After Hitting My Wife, 1937), Noksŏngdang (The Green Star Pharmacy, 1939), and the trilogy of Nangbi (Waste, 1940–41), Kyŏngyŏng (Management, 1940), and Maek (Barley, 1941), Kim put into practice his avowed aesthetic of realism by using techniques that were actually more reminiscent of a modernist aesthetic sensibility. One may wonder at this apparent incongruence. It seems safe to assume that Kim, now subject to the scrutiny of colonial censors, would choose a form of writing less transparent than the plain writing style that the realists had traditionally practiced. Yet beyond this explanation, we will also see that Kim Namch'ŏn may have been less deliberate in his choice of themes and styles. The discrepancy between Kim's theoretical reflections and his actual literary practice may be read, as we will read it here, as the symptom of a deeper conflict within the writer's views of the rapidly changing Korean peninsula.

We will focus our analysis on “The Green Star Pharmacy,” which, in addition to being one of Kim's most experimental fictions, is also one of his writings that has received less critical attention. The story was published in 1939 in a literary magazine called Munjang (Writing). It is divided into three unnumbered sections, and each section is narrated by what seems to be a different voice.Footnote ¹² The first section begins with a self-referential introduction:

In this passage, the first-person narrator Kim Namch'ŏn introduces Pak Sŏngun, the main character of the story, through a rather long, seemingly digressive reflection on his past literary fame and present anonymity. Following this, the reader learns that Pak disappeared from the public eye shortly after his literary debut because he was imprisoned for “a certain incident” (114). After Pak's recent death, a posthumous manuscript by him was found, a diary-like short story, and the narrator Kim declares that he will relate the “edited” version of such manuscript. Contemporary readers who were acquainted with the writer's life—that is, most of the insiders of the small Korean literary world—would have easily noticed the close parallel between Pak's life and that of Kim Namch'ŏn: Like Pak, Kim, too, had served a prison term for his socialist activism, and he, too, had come back from Seoul to Pyongyang to make a living with his pregnant wife, who was a licensed pharmacist.Footnote ¹³

Many learned readers, including the leftist writers, might have also recognized in the name of Pak Sŏngun the writer's allusion to the revolutionary hero of Cho Myŏnghǔi's novella Nakktonggang (The Naktong River, 1927).Footnote ¹⁴ Widely regarded as a classic of 1920s proletarian literature, the novella told the story of Pak Sŏngun, a nationalist-turned-socialist, who devoted his life to a range of social movements until he finally succumbed to an illness that struck him in prison. It was no coincidence that Kim, a voracious reader whose writings abound in intertextual references, would allude to Pak's legendary name, insisting on spelling out its Chinese characters (meaning “catching the cloud”) and spending the entire opening paragraph musing upon Pak's supposed faded fame. The forgotten name of Pak Sŏngun betokens the changed cultural climate of late colonial Korea. By 1939, the activist decade of the 1920s had become a distant memory, as Japan's policy of selective oppression had been successful in undermining the continuity of the leftist movement.

Although “The Green Star Pharmacy” has autobiographical elements, Kim's experimental narrative prevents the reader from approaching the story as an I-novel. In the interpretive convention of the I-novel, the reader is expected to identify the first- or third-person protagonist with the writer himself (Suzuki Reference Suzuki1996). Yet Kim's narrative deliberately disrupts such identification by creating an effect of infinite regression with the writer's multiple reflections of the self—the first-person narrator Kim Namch'ŏn, the late Pak Sŏngun, and the character Pak Sŏngun in Pak's I-novel—whose authenticity they mutually undermine. As the narrative moves on to its middle section, it becomes unclear who is giving the long, colorful descriptions of modern cultural scenes of Pyongyang as a booming commercial city.

In the middle section of the story, an unidentified first-person narrator guides the reader through downtown Pyongyang, describing the major streets lined with shops as well as the shabbier back alleys. The chatty, long-winded narration gradually approaches the building that houses Pak's wife's pharmacy, in a movement similar to a camera close-up:

The “green star” in the name of the pharmacy refers to the flag of the international Esperanto movement, which was popular among Korean intellectuals during the 1920s. The character of Pak Sŏngun had learned the language while he was in prison, “a quiet and solitary place,” and Kim, too, may have had some knowledge of it. The presence of the pharmacy—not a drug store—attests to the prosperity of late colonial Pyongyang, which was then undergoing rapid industrialization.

We are now at the doorstep of the Green Star Pharmacy, but instead of entering it, the narrator continues to look around the scenes of modern commercial culture. He takes more than a fleeting look at a bicycle repair shop, a signboard store, and a tailor of Western suits, dwelling every time to give entertaining descriptions of the place and its occupants. His interest is then caught by a redundantly named hardware store, “The Cheap Cheapo Store,” of which he relates the extravagant sales techniques of its clerks:Footnote ¹⁵

Overall, the brisk and ironic tone of the narration makes these descriptions especially amusing. And soon after, the depiction of street scenes ends with the narrator hurrying to finish his strolling—as though he had lost himself so far: “If I am to introduce every one of the gentlemanly merchants in this neighborhood, I will never finish. So I shall now turn to the Green Star Pharmacy” (120).

On the whole, this middle section is too lengthy and digressive to be interpreted merely as an account of the spatial background of the story. Rather, Kim's chatty stroll from shop to shop seems to command an autonomous significance within the narrative. Its anonymous first-person narrator may be either Pak referring to himself in the third person, or Kim indulging in description before relating Pak's story. Whoever it is, however, this narrator's cheerful, light-hearted voice stands at odds with the more subdued and reflective tones of the other sections of the story. This tonal discord, as we will see shortly, is indicative of an important thematic ambivalence within “The Green Star Pharmacy.”

The third and last section of the story offers an extract from Pak Sŏngun's diary-like record, with its action taking place almost entirely inside the pharmacy. Sŏngun is hosting a visitor, a young activist about twenty years old, who has come to ask him to give a lecture on the social mission of the arts to the dwellers of a local slum. The youth impassionedly argues that such a lecture would enlighten the poor, and that giving it is the social responsibility of a writer. Sŏngun listens quietly, feeling awkward and incapable of giving any response. He understands the young man's activist zeal, but he cannot readily offer either encouragement or criticism, as he is no longer sure of himself. After all, he thinks to himself, he was only recently released from prison. He quit his literary career to return to Pyongyang six months earlier, where he opened the pharmacy with his pregnant wife. He is now trying to get settled in his new life as a salesman, but now and then, he feels a pang of guilt for having left the movement. Sŏngun, however, cannot confess these thoughts to the visitor, and a timely phone call from a past comrade saves him from his predicament. The comrade, a socialist theater activist, asks for free medicine for his gonorrhea. Sŏngun sends the youth away with the promise that he will show up for the lecture that afternoon. He then busies himself packing the medicine for his friend. When his wife discovers it, however, Sŏngun receives a good scolding for looking after such a useless friend, who, according to the wife, likes to say “labor is sacred” and uses “petit bourgeois” as the biggest insult but is “an impossibly lazy, dependent, and beggarly lumpen” (133).

The confrontation with his wife leaves Sŏngun feeling overwhelmed: “Suddenly, he remembered the experience of diving competition in his childhood. How he shut tight his eyes and held his breath, since he did not want to lose. That frustrating sense of suffocation suddenly crossed his mind” (135). Ignoring his wife's objections, Sŏngun takes the medicines and leaves for the lecture. As he walks out to the street, a Japanese policeman greets him, “How is your business?” and Sŏngun replies in Japanese, Okage sama de (All is well—thanks to you) (136).

Taken as a whole, “The Green Star Pharmacy” is the portrait of an alienated ex-activist who feels uncomfortable with his new life but is also estranged from his past self. Behind Pak Sŏngun's alienation, we can recognize Kim's status as a convicted “thought offender,” whose physical and intellectual freedom were constrained under the Thought Offenders' Protection and Supervision Law of 1936. This law placed all supposed offenders under the supervision of the police and an individual civil sponsor, in order not only to “prevent offenders from repeating their crimes” but also to “guide them back to the correct national path” by “supporting” them in their mental and economic struggles (Minjok Reference Minjok2000, 463). The actual guidelines for enforcing the law, however, required the sponsor to restrict the offender's freedom of domicile as well as association (Minjok 2000, 485). In the story, Kim's situation as a thought offender under supervision is hinted at by Sŏngun's encounter with the Japanese policeman, who is likely in charge of regularly checking on him. Even before the encounter, however, Sŏngun feels a physical sense of suffocation. As the conversation with his young visitor attests, Sŏngun's old activist fire is all but extinguished. Giving a lecture to the poor does not seem to him so urgent anymore, and a comrade of old battles is now saddled with illness and poverty. As his wife unsympathetically reminds him, keeping such friendships is inconvenient now that he is running a business.

All of this, however, is but a part of the layered content of “The Green Star Pharmacy.” Incongruous with this main theme of gloomy activist frustration is the middle section of the story, in which we find Kim Namch'ŏn practicing a literature of customs through the close observation of everyday street scenes. The playful, almost jocular narration of this section hardly becomes a Marxist writer critical of capitalist modernization, let alone a depressed ex-activist. Rather, the unidentified narrator's voice here closely resembles that of a modern flâneur, a stroller who is leisurely exploring the fast-changing urban space. In fact, the incongruence is stylistic as well as thematic. The self-referential narrator, the montage of a variety of scenes, and the use of verbal and situational irony—all foreign to Kim's previous works—are reminiscent of the writing style of a contemporary modernist writer, Pak T'aewŏn, whose experimentalism Kim admired. Pak was the first Korean writer to adopt the idea of modernologio (kohyŏnhak), the near-ethnographic recording of urban scenes, in fictions such as Sosŏlga Kubossi ŭi iril (A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist) (Pak T'aewŏn Reference Pak T'aewŏn1934) and Ch'ŏnbyŏn p'ungyŏng (Streamside Sketches) (Pak T'aewŏn 1937). The first novella is particularly known for Pak's parody of himself as an urban stroller, in effect presenting the first Korean flâneur character.Footnote ¹⁶

Kim's use of modernologio in the middle section of “The Green Star Pharmacy” suggests a profound ambivalence within the novel. On the one hand, the story is written by and about a Marxist critic of modernity—Kim Namch'ŏn. But on the other hand, at the heart of the novel, we also find a narrator—Kim Namch'ŏn?—who is enchanted by modernity and its lively cityscapes. This unlikely convergence of a committed socialist and a flâneur may be interpreted as the mark of a deeply split subjectivity in its author. In fact, Kim seemed to nourish an ambivalent attitude toward the new urban modernity of late colonial Korea. He certainly was a convicted thought criminal, a man who was unable to become oblivious to the repressive aspects of the colonial power. Yet he was also a man of culture, a young writer who was charmed by the prosperity and innovations generated by that same power. This is Kim Namch'ŏn the modern flâneur, who at times found himself longing, albeit not without a sense of irony, for “a snobbish life in which one spends a day listening to Tchaikovsky and watching the daffodils grow, while sipping a well-brewed, bittersweet mocha coffee” (Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1939a, 133). In “The Green Star Pharmacy,” it seems, Kim gave a crafty, powerfully symbolic expression to his simultaneous attraction to and criticism of colonial modernity. He created a fragmented and cacophonous narrative that only loosely linked the scenes of urban everyday life with an ex-activist's continued struggle with the traumatic aftermath of the forced recantation.Footnote ¹⁷

Kim himself was aware of his own conflicted subjectivity. He openly discussed it, expressing his will to overcome it, in a 1937 essay entitled “The Intellectual's Schizophrenia and Indomitable Spirit.” In this essay, Kim identified two major themes in his writing—“the split subjectivity of a petit bourgeois intellectual” and “an unsullied, indomitable spirit that actively strives for self-improvement despite all the banality, insult, humiliation, and oppression” (Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1937c, 246–47). As a matter of fact, Kim was not alone in his struggle to cope with this sort of inconsistency. The “schizophrenia” in his essay was arguably symptomatic of a more general epistemological crisis among Korean intellectuals at this stage in the colonial experience. By the late 1930s, Korea under Japan was experiencing a rapid and unprecedented economic development paired by an equally unprecedented political oppression (Eckert Reference Eckert, Duus, Myers and Peattie1996; Robinson Reference Robinson2007, 76–99). During the 1920s, when Japan had kept Korea mainly as a rice basket and a secondary market, the imperial exploitation had been relatively barefaced, hence even the supporters of imperial developmentalism could complain that the progress was too slow. Beginning in the early 1930s, however, the process of industrialization started to bring ubiquitous signs of prosperity to the urban centers of Korea. Modernity, once limited to the talk of the elites, had become a lived reality in the streets. Many intellectuals belonged to the urban middle class and stood to materially benefit from these improved economic conditions. As a result, these intellectuals found themselves ideologically stranded, confused, and in the end unable to choose between a critique of society and a more alluring acquiescence to it. We can say that in a way, during this time, the Korean intellectuals were systematically suffering from an opaque historical vision.Footnote ¹⁸

We know today that the prosperity of late colonial Korea was a by-product of Japan's all-consuming war, hence it could not last long. Yet at least until 1942, Japan continued to triumph, and many Koreans could not foresee the evolving direction of the war until 1944 at the earliest. To account for this closure of a historical vision, we may draw a useful insight from Frederic Jameson's analysis of the inward turn of many European modernists in the early twentieth century. Jameson (Reference Jameson and Jameson1990) has argued that such a development was a consequence of the “epistemological containment” of European intellectuals, who at one point could no longer perceive the global flow of capital in their daily lives. A containment of a similar sort arguably struck Korean intellectuals in the late colonial period, as Korea became more integrated within Japan's capitalist system. Critical intellectuals such as Kim Namch'ŏn tried to overcome their epistemological crisis through the critical analysis of everyday life. Yet they could not readily perceive, in the daily living scenes, the historical force that shaped contemporary Korean social conditions, that is, the war that was unfolding on overseas battlefronts.

By the early 1940s, most Korean intellectuals had abandoned the two main political visions that had shaped their worldviews since the late nineteenth century. On the one hand, Western liberalism, which had hitherto been looked upon as the pinnacle of universal human progress, seemed to be decaying in the self-destructive conflagration of two world wars. In addition to Japan's anti-Western propaganda, the writings of apocalyptic thinkers such as Oswald Spengler contributed to this bleak view of the West (Kim Yerim Reference Kim Yerim2002). On the other hand, the Marxist promise of evolution toward a communist utopia no longer sounded credible, as a proletarian upheaval now seemed to be only a remote possibility in the tightening political conditions of the peninsula. In the ensuing ideological vacuum, and with the war mostly bringing success, many intellectuals became vulnerable to the tempting “third way” that, in concurrence with the spread of fascism in Europe, became available in the powerful ideology of pan-Asianism. We will see in the next section how Kim Namch'ŏn responded to the spread of pan-Asianism among Korean intellectuals. Ironically, if Kim's focus on everyday life had previously left him exposed to the lures of modernity, that same focus may have helped him recognize in pan-Asianism an abstract ideology that lacked grounding in the lived historical conditions of the Asian people.

Everyday Life as a Critical Space in the Greater East Asian War

Korea's involvement in Japan's war effort entered a new phase on the eve of the Pacific War. As Japan's army was bogged down in China and the prospect of military confrontation with Western powers loomed, Japan sought to maximize the mobilization of natural and human resources in its colonies. To this end, the imperial authority used both coercive measures and the ideological propaganda of pan-Asianism (Kushner Reference Kushner2006).

Japan's discourse of pan-Asianism dates back to the Meiji era, but it received a new articulation around 1940 as a rationale of the Greater East Asian War by the conservative philosophers of the Kyotō school, most notably Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). At its theoretical core, pan-Asianism had two interrelated political agendas: On the one hand, it promoted the solidarity of Asian nations on the basis of their racial and cultural affinity against Western imperial aggressors; on the other hand, it asserted Japan's leadership in such an alliance even to the extent of justifying its imperial conquest of other Asian nations. While pan-Asianism in earlier periods had advocated an alternative, more desirable modernization in which the spiritual values of the East would complement the material advancement of the West, pan-Asianism in the wartime propaganda envisioned a “postmodern” telos purged of the evils of Western modernity. In the contemporary Japanese discourse of “overcoming the modern” (kindai no chōkoku), the very idea of modernity came to refer to a West-originated cultural totality that encompassed Western imperialism, capitalism, science, democracy, liberalism, and individualism (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2000b, 34–47; Takeuchi Reference Takeuchi and Calichman2005, 111–18). Under Japan's leadership, the Asian nations were to replace Western modernity in toto with a new Asian cultural totality, which they would recreate by reviving native traditions. Accordingly, Japan's wartime propaganda projected the utopian vision of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as a harmonious world, in which Asian countries would preserve and celebrate their ethnic and cultural uniqueness under the benevolent aegis of Japan.

Many contemporary Korean intellectuals found the pluralist tenor of pan-Asianism attractive (Kim Chaeyong Reference Kim Chaeyong2004; Kim and Miran Reference Kim and Miran2003; Yi Kyŏnghun Reference Yi Kyŏnghun and yŏn'guhoe1995). Lured by the vision of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and drawn by the attendant material gains, many intellectuals willingly extended their support for the war. At the same time, as the clouds of war thickened over Japan and its empire, the pressure became stronger on public figures in Korea to openly pledge adherence to the official ideology of the empire. This was especially true for the leftists. Those who had been forced to recant socialism during the 1930s had been generally left free to find their own refuge in Christianity, cultural nationalism, pure literature, or a reformulated Marxism. By contrast, recantation in the early 1940s implied a writer's open reorientation from socialism to pan-Asianism.Footnote ¹⁹

As more and more intellectuals converted to pan-Asianism, some remained unpersuaded by the vision of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. This may have been the case with Kim Namch'ŏn, who, even as the war was raging, kept writing and publishing fictions such as Maek (Barley, 1941), Tǔngbul (Lamp, 1942), and Kurŭm i malhagi rŭl (So Says the Cloud, 1942). Kim has been read elsewhere as one of the writers who did convert from socialism to pan-Asianism during these years. Kim Chul especially has interpreted the writer's split subjectivity as a symptom of his inclination toward fascism, noting the substantial presence of pan-Asianist discourses in Kim's late colonial writings (Kim Chul Reference Kim Chul2001). As I will try to show, however, a reading of this kind underestimates the considerable pressure that censorship exercised over Kim's continuing literary activity. As the official philosophy of the empire, pan-Asianism would naturally appear in a positive light in every publication accepted by the censor. But in the works of some writers, and I believe in Kim's, strategies were deployed that would allow a more critical and balanced evaluation of the doctrines of pan-Asianism.

I will make my case through a close reading of Barley, which is perhaps one of Kim's best-known but more easily misunderstood works. Barley is the last of a trilogy whose other parts are entitled Waste and Management.Footnote ²⁰ Its central character is Mugyŏng, a woman in her early twenties who works as an accountant in an apartment management office. A three-storied modern building is at once her workplace and her home. She has recently moved into one of the apartments, having left her parental home upon her widowed mother's remarriage. However, Mugyŏng would not be living alone but for the betrayal of her fiancé, Sihyŏng. She looked after him for two years while he was waiting for trial in prison as a thought offender, and it was through her efforts that he was finally released on bail. Sihyŏng has apparently changed during his stay in prison. In his own words, he has converted “from economics to philosophy, and from a unitary view of history to a pluralist one” (1941b, 288). Both adjustments connote his reorientation from Marxism to pan-Asianism in the contemporary cultural context. Now that Sihyŏng has undergone an ideological conversion, he has also reconciled with his wealthy father, who had been opposed to his marrying Mugyŏng, a woman of moderate education and fortune. Abandoning his devoted fiancée, Sihyŏng has followed his father to Pyongyang.

Puzzled at this sudden betrayal, Mugyŏng takes to reading the philosophy books Sihyŏng has left behind. In this state, she meets a new tenant, Kwanhyŏng, a former lecturer of English literature at Kyŏngsŏng Imperial University, who is now leading an idle life as a boutique owner's kept lover. At Mugyŏng's inquiry, Kwanhyŏng discusses with her the philosophical premises of pan-Asianism and submits his own critique of its lack of material basis. At the end of their conversation, Kwanhyŏng remarks that if he were an ear of barley, he would rather remain buried in the earth instead of being milled into bread. Mugyŏng replies that she prefers to bloom on her own.

On Sihyŏng's trial day, Mugyŏng goes to court, where she discovers that he has been betrothed to the wealthy daughter of the governor of Pyongyang. Soon, Kwanhyŏng will be gone, too; he has abandoned his mistress and left the apartment. The ending finds Mugyŏng back in the same condition she was in at the beginning—alone and lonely in her bed, despite her renewed determination to live “for herself and herself alone” (291).

At the powerful core of Barley's narrative is the experience of betrayal recounted from a woman's perspective. In choosing this theme, Kim was adopting a literary strategy first developed by Kang Kyŏngae and Paek Sinae, two socialist women writers, in the post-recantation period. Both Kang's In'gan munje (The Human Problem, Reference Kang and Sanggyǒng1934) and Paek's Kwangin sugi (A Mad Woman's Memoir, Reference Paek1938) portray a woman's tragic fall into insanity and death after a converted socialist intellectual has abandoned her. As a gendered literary strategy, the narrative of betrayal allowed these writers to establish a meaningful linkage between the sentimental infidelity of male socialist intellectuals and their political conversion. Transposed within Barley, however, the theme of betrayal acquires an added layer of subtlety and complexity. Mugyŏng is ultimately abandoned by two men, of whom one has converted to pan-Asianism and the other criticizes it. So beyond their confronting ideological positions, and regardless of their success in supporting them, both men are in different measures contributing to Mugyŏng's misery. In framing Barley around Mugyŏng's emotional pain, Kim enigmatically hints at a malaise that seems to go beyond the rational confrontation between his two male characters. This ulterior malaise, whose nature is not made clear in the story, suffuses the characters of Sihyŏng and Kwanhyŏng in an ambiguous light within the narrative economy of Barley.

Given the above complexities, it seems misleading to read Barley as a document of its author's conversion. To be sure, the story contains much that can be read as an elegiac advocation of pan-Asianism, and it also gives a sharp sense of the failure of socialist activism in late colonial Korea. At the same time, it seems clear that the novella is not meant to be read as an I-novelist confessional of Kim Namch'ŏn's own conversion. Especially through the character of Sihyŏng, Kim seems rather to be offering a partially empathetic analysis of the rationale of conversion among Korean leftists. When Sihyŏng testifies his conversion at court, he openly endorses the pluralist historical vision of pan-Asianism, renouncing his Marxism and mentioning in his final statement two renowned Japanese philosophers, Watsuji Tetsurō and Tanabe Hajime. Once away from the court, however, in his farewell letter to Mugyŏng, Sihyŏng also makes the following confession, which focuses not so much on his ideological reorientation as on his desire for a total rebirth:

Sihyŏng's confession offers a glimpse into the interiority of a leftist intellectual who has grown tired of his thankless role as a critic without a positive historical outlook. It is easy to sympathize with Sihyŏng's lamentation that “[t]hose who only criticize create nothing,” especially at a time when a Marxist critique seemed less and less likely to produce any concrete effects in the short or long run. Accordingly, Sihyŏng declares himself willing to renounce his political past in exchange for an optimistic vision of the future, a total remake of his life. We may say, in accord with Kim Chul, that leftists such as Sihyŏng “took a leap from the transcendental subject of ‘class’ to yet another transcendental subject, ‘Asian’” (2001, 393).

Yet not all leftists would take that leap. Kim Namch'ŏn makes this point in Kwanhyŏng's voice: “Even great philosophers like Nishida are taking pains to create a pure Japanese ideology by using Western methods. In Korea too, there are people who talk about a pure Korean philosophy. I can sympathize with them, but all is in the name with no real substance” (327). The wartime discourse of pan-Asianism rested upon the polarity of a materialist, corrupted West versus a spiritual, virtuous East. As Kwanhyŏng suggests, however, the very idea of the East, or the Orient, was a Western theorization that could be grasped only through Western paradigms:

As Kwanhyŏng implies, the untainted Orient posited by pan-Asianism existed only in theory. In actuality, a Western influence had by the 1930s become structural within Japanese and Korean society, which had been turning irrevocably modern since the late nineteenth century (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2000b; Robinson Reference Robinson2007). And a native tradition could not be retrieved without bearing the imprint of a modern cultural discourse that had its basis in West-originated paradigms.

Kwanhyŏng further criticizes pan-Asianism for its endorsement of a monadic vision of Asia's future, in disregard of the existing racial and cultural conflicts among Asian countries. When Mugyŏng asks him about this particular historical vision of pan-Asianism, Kwanhyŏng answers by pointing to the existing gap between the ideal of a unified Asia and the actual differences between Asians:

If Western imperialism typically erased the histories of the colonies, casting them in an imaginary past of the empire, pan-Asianism was on the surface more pluralistic, as it acknowledged that each culture had had its own autonomous course of development. As Kwanhyŏng suggests, however, in the end pan-Asianism might dissolve the material present of Japan's colonies into an equally imaginary vision of an Asia with a “common” historical destiny. His comments echo Kim's own voice in an essay published shortly before Barley (Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1941a, 687–88). Commenting on Kōyama Iwao's pluralist view of world history, Kim suggested there that in projecting the vision of a unified Asia, pan-Asianism might disregard the existing divergences among Asian countries.Footnote ²¹

Although Kwanhyŏng is also critical of the West, he refrains from condemning Western modernity completely. Instead, he thinks that the problem lies not in Western modernity per se but in its “superficial” understanding (332). The narrative does not clarify what he implies by a deeper understanding of Western modernity. We can conjecture, however, that he is referring to what Tosaka called “the scientific spirit,” that is, the kind of materialist rationalism originated in the ideas of Marx. Indeed, in the essay “The Question of Human Nature and the Future of the Novel,” published one month after Barley in March 1941, Kim Namch'ŏn reiterated Tosaka's Marxist materialist thesis that “we must grasp a human nature in its concreteness and regard it as a construct of social customs” (Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Houng and Chŏngsu1941c, 715).Footnote ²² Owing to his continued commitment to a Marxist worldview, it seems, Kim was disposed against becoming an upholder of pan-Asianism. In fact, by distinguishing Marxism from the hegemonic imperialist ideologies of the West, Kim implicitly refused to endorse the pan-Asianist monadic view of the West.

If one could still retain a Marxist worldview, however, one had little room to exercise it in wartime Korea, whose public sphere had by then fallen under the total control of Japan's military regime. Hence, Kwanhyŏng wishes to remain “buried in the earth,” that is, living a private life outside of the public sphere (335). This is where Kim Namch'ŏn introduces the metaphor of “barley,” which he deploys to a remarkable double-meaning effect. Kwanhyŏng quotes Vincent Van Gogh as saying, “Men are like ears of barley. What does it matter if they are not sown in the earth to germinate there? Aren't they milled into bread in the end? Indeed, we should pity those that are not milled” (330).Footnote ²³ Read within the context of the story, this quote forms a background to Kwanhyŏng and Mugyŏng's unwillingness to respond to Japan's clarion call, and their wish to preserve their personal autonomy against the increasing totalitarian pressure. However, within the political context of 1940s Korea, Van Gogh's quote could also be interpreted as a justification for the totalitarian demand of human sacrifice. The inaugural issue of the magazine Ch'unch'u, in which Barley was published, was filled with government-sponsored articles such as “The Glory of the Korean Youth,” which called for Korean volunteers to join the imperial army.Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, the title of Kim's story itself would have reminded a contemporary reader of another barley—the barley of Mugi to heitai (Barley and Soldiers, 1938), Hino Ashihei's best-selling propagandistic war fiction. This novel made a sensation in Japan, and its translation was also apparently widely read among Korean men of letters (Kim Chaeyong Reference Kim Chaeyong2004, 102–3; Paek Reference Paek1938, 48; Rosenfield Reference Rosenfield2002). In Hino's usage, barley was an allegory of the alien Chinese landscape seen from Japanese soldiers' perspective (Hino Reference Hino, Bush and Bush1939). But because the novel focused so much on depicting the hardship and sacrifice of Japanese soldiers, Van Gogh's barley would have easily added another layer to Hino's barley as an allegory of a human life.

It is important to note that Barley is narrated from Mugyŏng's perspective, and that she also occupies some of the most poignant moments in the story. Kim Namch'ŏn had never before adopted a woman's perspective in his fictions. Moreover Kwanhyŏng, the character who criticizes pan-Asianism, ostensibly has his masculinity compromised: At their first encounter, Mugyŏng finds him lying in bed, wearing what appears to be “a bright woman's gown” (306). We may find a clue to the significance of this feminization of Kim's characters in Rita Felski's observation of a parallel phenomenon in the works of the European avant-gardes. In The Gender of Modernity, Felski notes that the imaginary identification with the feminine was common among the avant-garde writers, who generally felt alienated from the dominant social norms of masculinity. In the works of these writers, Felski writes, “the feminized male became a provocative emblem of the contemporary crisis of values” (Reference Felski1995, 92). Seen in this light, the feminization of Kim's positive characters again assumes a double meaning: On the one hand, it signifies the writer's own undermined masculinity as a physically and politically constrained colonial intellectual, but on the other hand, that same stance can be interpreted as emblematic of Kim's defiance of the belligerent masculinity Japan demanded of its imperial subjects, who were expected to sacrifice their lives readily for the “sacred” war.

As Leo T. S. Ching has suggested, in Taiwan, the wartime discourse of pan-Asianism replaced the traditional institutional discrimination of the colonized with a more inclusive “ontology of the personal” (Reference Ching2001, 126). The colonized were now expected to transcend their local identities, joining instead in an equal community of “Asians.” Ching's observation is applicable to Korea, too, but only to a lesser degree, as Japan was forced to resort to more coercive measures in Korea because of a widespread lack of compliance (Chou Reference Chou, Duus, Myers and Peattie1996). For Korean writers who were not willing to support Japan's military campaigns, a solipsistic withdrawal seemed to be the only available recourse. Kim Namch'ŏn was no exception. He stopped writing fiction in Reference Kim Namch'ŏn, Chaeyong, Miran and Hyekŏng1943, and in his few last publications we find him retiring deeper into private space.Footnote ²⁵ In the memorable last scene of Lamp, we find his partly autobiographical character Chang reading a bedtime story to his son.Footnote ²⁶ After the boy falls asleep, Chang sits in silence, surrounded by darkness except for a small pool of light from a desk lamp. He feels a sense of comfort in the island of light, his refuge from the great currents of history swirling around him, threatening to swallow the last bit of his autonomy. Theodor Adorno (Reference Adorno, Mitchell and Blomster1973) could not have found a better example for his argument of an artist's solipsism as a social, rather than an asocial, consequence.